15 articles tagged with music were found.
This research note investigates the revival of Ukrainian folk music in the (re)invented military funeral rituals during the ongoing war on Ukraine. Since the 2022 full-scale invasion, elements of folk music – such as historical Cossack songs, the Carpathian trembita, and lullabies – have re-emerged in urban civic mourning, symbolizing national grief, resistance, and identity. Drawing on concepts of revival, postrevival, and (re)invention (Livingston, Bithell & Hill, Hobsbawm, Prickett), the article examines how these musical forms are recontextualized in response to trauma and loss. Through three specific case studies, the article explores how Ukrainian folk music has been adapted to contemporary urban ritual settings and examines its role in shaping symbolic expressions of memory, resilience, and cultural continuity in wartime Ukraine. The study contributes to the broader discourse on the role of music in ritual transformation in the context of war and conflict.
By
Inna Shvorak
October 23, 2025
This research examines the uncharted phenomenon of rave tolokas, where electronic dance music practice merges with cleaning war-torn villages in Ukraine, fostering community, resistance, and cultural identity amidst the full-scale war in Ukraine. It interprets rave tolokas as embodied, physicalaffective experiences that intertwine dance and labor to restore cultural spaces. Through music and sonic material, participants actively confront war, challenging narratives of rave culture as escapism. Contributing to (ethno)musicology and conflict studies, this work highlights music’s multifaceted roles in armed conflict. It draws on participatory digital ethnographic methods, including in-depth interviews, addressing the challenges of conducting wartime research.
By
Emma C. Schrott
October 23, 2025
How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.
By
Anna Schwenck and Anastasia Bondarenko
October 23, 2025
Being once a central component of Soviet popular culture, the Vokal’no-Instrumental’nyi Ansambls [Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble] (VIA) repertoire has become a shared heritage across today’s former Soviet republics. While portrayed in the media as a depoliticized historical phenomenon, some music groups still active today like the Soviet Belarusian VIAs Pesniary, Siabry, Verasy and Charaunitsy have in part also become entwined with domestic politics.
Focusing on Belarus, this article explores through virtual ethnography and a multimodal critical discourse analysis the intersection between popular music and politics. It especially focuses on how Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, drawing on populist strategies, champions artists like the mentioned VIAs that support his ideology. Over his 30-year rule Lukashenka has promoted a national identity based in part on Soviet nostalgia. The mentioned VIAs are not only important drivers of contemporary Belarusian national identity, but they also provide a bridge to the Soviet past. Not only are they (in) directly supported by Lukashenka and the Belarusian state, they in different ways also support Lukashenka and were thus notably absent in the protests following the contested presidential elections in 2020.
By
David-Emil Wickström
October 23, 2025
August 24, 2023, Helsinki Music Centre, Finland. In the concert hall, the last sounds of the orchestra gradually fade away, and only the fragile, almost unheard echoes of music linger through several minutes of silence. Then — long standing ovations. At the same time, how-ever, many of the audience members in the full house of 1 600 seats are openly crying. The audience had just heard HUSH (2023), a concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the last work of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. She had passed away at the age of 70 only a couple of weeks before this performance
The essay is based on several interviews with the composer, and on reviews of her works that I have made while working as a music journalist and critic between 1997 and 2003. After my transition to an academic career in musicology, I continued working with Saariaho’s music but in the scientific context. In 2008, I wrote my doctoral thesis on her first opera, L’amour de loin (Love from Afar, 2000). Since then, I have continued to explore Saariaho’s music, and above anything else focused on her operas; for instance, I have written the program book texts of her works for the Finnish National Opera. That is why this essay, after introducing Saariaho’s early years and development towards a full career as an opera composer, concentrates on her operatic works.
Essay by
Liisamaija Hautsalo
September 18, 2024
History is not fixed and unchanging, and the way we think about the concept of nation can affect the way we talk about the past. This also applies to the history of music. Let me give you an example. In volume 2 of his seminal book on music history, The Oxford History of Western Music, the late Richard Taruskin talks about the circle of fifths, a diagram that helps you visually organize Western music theory’s 12 chromatic pitches for learning purposes. He mentions that the circle of fifths first appeared in a Russian music theory book published in Moscow in 1679, decades before Western music theorists began to talk about it. However, the book itself was not originally Russian, but was translated from Polish. Moreover, the author was a Ukrainian clergyman and singing teacher who was born in Kyiv, at that time part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with Krakow as its capital.
When Taruskin published his book in 2004, the background for the first appearance of the circle of fifths was just an interesting anecdote referring to the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Eastern Europe in the 17th century. But how can — or should — one speak of it after February 24, 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? How do you even pronounce the name of the Ukrainian cleric? Nikolai Diletsky, following the Russian form as published in the first edition, or Mykola Diletsky, in the Ukrainian form, as he was born in Kyiv and is considered part of Ukrainian music history?
By
Gergely Fazekas
September 18, 2024
Olli-Pekka Martikainen is the Secretery General of the Association of Finnish Music Schools, an umbrella organization that includes 97 schools. He has a doctorate in music and he previously worked as the vice dean of the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Apart from leadership in higher music education Martikainen has worked as an orchestral and chamber musician and as a teacher at the Sibelius Academy. Martikainen holds the first artistic Doctoral degree in the field of percussion music in Finland. Ann Werner asked him questions about higher music education in the Baltic region with her own research on nation and gender in higher music education as background.
By
Ann Werner
September 18, 2024
This article describes and analyzes assessment approaches in three conservatories and thus contributes to the study of how values are distributed and negotiated within higher education specialized in classical music in the Baltic Sea region and Central Europe. The relation between assessment and learning could be viewed from different perspectives. Assessment of learning can be seen as a checkpoint regarding whether specific knowledge has been internalized, assessment for learning implies that the chosen assessment method encourages the learning process, while assessment as learning can be seen as intertwined with and dominating the learning process. In this article we clarify possibilities for transformative assessment, as well as the risk for assessment as learning. What counts as important knowledge varies between and within the perspectives. To generate material to enable analysis of assessment approaches in the Baltic Sea region and Central Europe, 23 students and 22 professors/leaders within three conservatories were interviewed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed through content analysis by the two researchers individually and collaboratively. The results show three different approaches, namely the competition approach, the portfolio approach, and the response-based approach.
By
Cecila Ferm Almqvist and Kristi Kiilu
September 18, 2024
Towards the end of the 19th century, Ingrian Finns became aware of their own national identity and culture. These ideas were maintained by the Kolppana Teacher and Churchwarden Seminary, which was founded in 1863. At the turn of the twentieth century, national thinking also began to emerge from the deep ranks of Ingrian-Finnish people, partly because Ingrian-born teachers and churchwardens educated in Kolppana formed a new, schooled intelligentsia. Music played a central role in the national process, and the Kolppana graduates taught religious and patriotic repertoire. The new intelligentsia comprised only men because the Kolppana Seminary was not open to women. The Ingrian Finns strove to preserve their own language, Lutheran religion, and national customs. Even though they recognized Finland as their spiritual homeland, the Ingrian-Finnish national spirit was marked by a clear “Ingrianism”.
By
Samuli Korkalainen
September 18, 2024
Countries in the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe have been called home by some of the great composers of music history, and the region hosts some of the world’s most prestigious higher classical music education institutions. Despite this fact, Liisamaija Hautsalo states in her essay, the last of this section, that the Finnish-born composer Kaija Saariaho was perceived as being from “a faraway periphery” when she moved in the classical music circles of France, Germany and the US. In a scholarly context I was recently told that (post-communist) Central and Eastern European institutions are not representative of European higher classical music education. The person making this statement obviously assumed that European higher classical music education happens in the UK, or maybe in Germany and Austria. While I did not agree, this feedback speaks volumes about how classical music and higher classical music education is constructed as belonging to Western Europe in international academic debate today. In this special section the authors wish to problematize the role of nation and gender in higher classical music education, and the classical music contexts this education operates in, by focusing on the Baltic and Central and Eastern European region. By doing so we put the assumed Western European identity of classical music and higher classical music education in question.
By
Ann Werner
September 18, 2024
Issue 2026, 1: 
Issue 2026, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.